Ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. This web site is my attempt to document, from my perspective, these "interesting times".

Thursday, March 24, 2005

The Ramp to Masada

Just to make the point clear that winning on the issues is for shit if you
can't win on the message, I point you to this
Josh Marshall post:

I must say, I hope the supporters of
Social Security aren't resting on their collective laurels just because the
president's jihad against the program got off to such an abysmal start.

Today, in newspapers and on websites across the country,
headlines used words like 'broke', 'bankrupt' and 'bust' to describe
what happens to Social Security when it starts running a deficit at some
time in the middle of this century. Only weeks ago, President Bush was being
forced to back off such misleading and deceptive language. And many
Republicans were openly criticizing him for it. Now these are the words of
choice in supposedly straight news reportage.

Supporters of Social Security really don't have the luxury of letting one
lie or distortion go unchallenged or unanswered.

The polling on Bush' s Social Security plan is atrocious and has been getting
worse by the day. Yet the Republican messaging has been absorbed fully by the
establishment media and regurgitated full-blown at the first opportunity. The
Democrats have spent months bringing down Bush's talk about "bankruptcy", but
all that work meant nothing if we honestly examine the headlines.

Bush's program is being rejected. But his language is not. That language is
The Ramp to Masada.
It just makes it that much easier for the next attack to succeed.